24° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL

Era notte a Roma città aperta

It Was Night in Open City

Country: Italy
Year: 2006
Duration: 120'


The film shows the Liberation of Italy from German occupation from various points of view. The “threads” of the story are the characters from 4 films by Roberto Rossellini – Roma città aperta, 1945, Paisà, 1946, Era notte a Roma, 1960, and Anno Uno, 1974 – who, through a series of sequences of the films, collectively re-tell a fundamental story in the history of the country, between the winter of 1943 and the winter of 1945. These two years which changed Italy are thus reconstructed through the faces and the dialogs of the most famous characters of Rossellini’s universe: from Don Pietro and Pina in Roma città aperta, to Francesca and Fred in Paisà, and Alcide De Gasperi in Anno Uno. These same sequences were also written down as a text which, in the form of a collective, linear story, represents Rossellini’s encyclopedic work about the history of western civilization.

Biography

film director

Fondazione Roberto Rossellini, Istituto Metacultura

The Fondazione Roberto Rossellini has worked on the Laboratorio Rossellini project for 20 years; it’s aim is to classify and digitalize all the documents gathered by the director in order to create a monumental, encyclopedic work. The foundation isn’t just a place for continuing Rossellini’s complex heredity, it’s also a laboratory in which people can study and make projects. It’s not a museum to be contemplated but, as the director himself would have wanted, a place in which his lessons continue to be followed and developed.  The Foundation also carries out educational projects, constructing hyper-medial instruments in this era of cinema and television, in order to broadcast the humanistic culture which Rossellini himself aimed at continuing and promoting.

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